 Hello, my name is Trevor Youngberg, and I'm a working wood-fired potter in Woodbridge, Connecticut. I realized my passion for pottery when I was a freshman at college. I went to school at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and it was my second semester that my mom had urged me to take a pottery class. So I took the class, and it wasn't, like, love at first sight. It was challenging. It wasn't until spring break in March that I took a trip out to Colorado, and on the way I stopped in Nebraska and visited a couple of different professors, one at Carney State University, one at the University of Nebraska, and also I stopped in and checked out a couple galleries. So through conversations with these professors and one particular gallery I recall, I saw hundreds of pieces and was amazed by the variation, both in form and surface and color, that I actually remember getting to Colorado after a long day of skiing, trying to fall asleep that night. Just as I was falling asleep, pots started popping into my mind's eye, and there were pots that weren't the ones I had seen earlier that day. It was that point that I realized that my mind was starting to really process pottery and form, and it was of deep interest. So I returned back to college after spring break, kind of broke through some technical challenges in my ability to make, and from that point on I was hooked. There's been different people that have come into my life as influences. In college, for sure, it was my professor Kirk Freeman, who I learned so much through just watching him work and his sharing the oral tradition. I still this day believe I remember every single thing he told me, and I asked him every single question I possibly could think of while I was in college, about not just making, but kill design, clay as chemistry, all that stuff. And so once I got out of college I sought out another local potter by the name of Warren McKenzie, who had more of a broader footprint in the clay world, in that he was more of an internationally renowned potter. So I developed a correspondence or a relationship with him over a course of a couple years and got a completely different sort of input. At first it was almost harshly critical, but what I found is that I would process his ideas and his responses and reactions to my work, and it wouldn't take more than a few days until I'd make a mental breakthrough in that he was right, you know, incorporating too much texture with too much surface decoration might be a little bit much, or maybe the forms on my pictures were a little awkward. Things along those lines where I was able to make strides in my ability to make pieces that were satisfying to me. So Warren McKenzie was an influence. And then after that there was a potter out in Illinois, Galena, Illinois, Charlie Fatch. He was a guy that I could really identify with as a personality, and some of the best advice that he gave me was that it's just so crucially important to balance family and your artistic passion, because in so many cases artists can go a little too heavily way their creativity regarding their time and their priorities. And so he was a craftsman, he was a builder, he made tiles, he did bronze sculptures, he brewed beer, he had a museum, he fired beautiful pottery. So he was this renaissance man that I was overwhelmed and inspired by. And since interacting and corresponding with Charlie Fatch, I've kind of gone on my own and kind of blended the three major influences of my ceramics career into what I'm doing today. My goal as a high school teacher isn't to turn students into potters, artists, or even art teachers, but to give them some tools to go about living with after they leave my classroom. And probably the number one thing that I try to get across to my kids is the importance and the usefulness of creative problem solving. Because that is a skill that applied to any career will bring you to the next level and help you stick out among the rest. You know, a blend of, of course, like the business side and science, math and engineering and technology. But if you throw the creative component in there, you're great. Like I have several students that have chosen to go on to engineering careers but they've developed their creativity in the pottery classroom, their problem solving abilities, and it helps, it helps out. It's just, you know, I think a lot of people could use really thinking, really directly about that message where there are no failures, only solutions, no problems, only solutions.